Beyond Selidor

I feel as if the weekend has somewhat run away from me, but, looking back, I do seem to have got a lot done.

Saturday was gloriously sunny, so once I returned from the gym, I spent quite a bit of the afternoon sitting out on the deck, finishing my book — Bread and War (Felicity Spector) — under the pear and cherry trees. ( The book is basically Spector travelling around Ukraine, eating lots of delicious food, served to her by remarkable people working in incredibly difficult circumstances ) Don't read this book when hungry, or you will find yourself craving vast piles of food!

On Saturday night, I laid the coffee table with lots of food on which to graze, and Matthias and I watched Eurovision. As I said previously, all our local friends who used to join us for watch parties have moved away, so it was just the two of us, although I had additional company in the form of the group chat of my friends from the Philip Pullman fan forum. Those of us taking part in the conversation were a true pan-European Eurovision crowd: a Welsh person in south Wales, a British person living in Switzerland (but in Geneva, not watching from the audience in Basel), a Finnish person in Helsinki, and two Australians living in England. We all universally agreed that the intermission mashup Käärijä/Baby Lasagne song was better than every competing song, and would have voted for it if we could!

Today, after a slow start, Matthias and I spontaneously decided to do a 5km circular walk, which includes the park by the cathedral, a long stretch by the river (where we saw vast numbers of water birds, and a herd of cows lying placidly in the grass), and then a winding journey through the suburban streets of the town. This at least helped me feel that I'd done some movement for the day.

After our return, I curled up in the living room and read my way through the once_upon_fic collection. I didn't think I had the time to participate in this exchange this year, but I've enjoyed reading the contributions of others. I'll stick a few recs behind a cut.

( Recs here )

I'll leave you with one final link: the rather cool news that the children's picture book written by one of my undergraduate friends from Australia has been selected for the Australian National Simultaneous Storytelling initiative, which is pretty amazing.

I can feel myself tumbling unstoppably towards a really bad downswing of the mood, but there's still swimming, and cooking, and coffee, and chatting with the people in the bakery down the road, and wandering along the river, and I suppose that will have to be enough. Above all things, I suppose, there are books.

I've read three new-to-me books since last week:

( Here they are behind the cut )



Onward to snowflake_challenge: Make a list of fannish and/or creative resources.

I was going to link to the usual fandom resources I always highlight on these things — fandomcalendar for keeping track of exchanges and other events, recthething for an active recs community, fffriday for a comm focused on f/f relationships in fiction, and so on, but then I had another idea. One of my favourite works of fiction of all time is Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, but I struggle to summarise coherently what it's all about in a way that both encompasses everything, and lets potential readers know what they're in for. Luckily for me, though, hamsterwoman has done a brilliant job of this in a recent post, which I thought I'd recommend here for anyone who is interested in checking out this exquisite series. There are even fanfic recs and icons!

Speaking of icons, that's another thing I thought I'd highlight here: I've recently seen a number of people asking about good sources of Dreamwidth icons, so I thought I'd list the main places I go for such things. There are two fairly active comms: icons (fandom icons, but also stock icons for stuff like food, drinks, seasonal, holidays, flowers, colours etc), and fandom_icons (mainly specific fandoms). I also know several people who are fairly active icon makers, and over the years I've ended up with a fair few icons by peaked, svgurl, and misbegotten, so you may be interested in looking at their icon posts as well.

Feel free to add your own icon-related suggestions in the comments!

I think I have a new fandom, and that fandom is the Australian Electoral Commission, or, more specifically, its Twitter account.

I loathe a lot of Australian politicians, my contempt for the country's current government knows no bounds, and I deplore the generally mercenary attitudes of Australian voters (elections tend to be lost due to fear of supposed tax increases, and won by the party which suburban voters believe will save them money in some way), but wow do I love our electoral system.

A rigorously, zealously independent electoral commission at local, state and federal level, preferential voting (if you're not going to do proportional representation, this is a good alternative), and above all, compulsory voting which means that not only is voting easy, quick, and straightforward, the AEC goes out of its way to get ballots to Australians in the most remote and inaccessible of locations: basically if your 'democracy' doesn't have these things, it feels like a very watered-down example of democracy to me. (This should not be interpreted as me smugly placing blame for said watered-down democracies at the feet of their citizens and voters, obviously.)

My love for all these things is directly proportional to how much the right-wingers in Australia detest them, and how obvious it is that they are unable to get rid of them precisely because these things exist and hinder them in doing so. (That said, we should never get too complacent; the fact that the right-wing government keeps making noises about getting rid of compulsory voting should be a massive wake up call to everyone. As an Australian immigrant in the UK, my current home country is an object lesson in the terrible consequences of voter complacency.)

I was talking to my mother and sister via FaceTime this morning and Mum was telling me all about her radio programme this week (she's a radio broadcaster who does a programme which takes events that are making headlines and does a deep dive into the history behind them, interviewing historians, economists, commentators, activists, archivists etc). The progamme this week is all about studies into using psychodelic drugs to treat mental health conditions. After a while, Mum fell to reminiscing about the '70s, and my sister and I were sitting there in amusement at a number of anecdotes that began 'and that time [ex-boyfriend] and I were taking magic mushrooms/acid/etc'.

I had the dual realisation that a) my parents had a way more adventurous youth than I did (I'd known about most of this stuff already, but it's not exactly something I think about actively) and b) if I wanted to obtain illicit drugs in the UK, I would have no idea who to ask, whereas I know at least twenty people in Canberra and Sydney I could ask, should I want to do so. My social circles in Australia are as equally filled with high achieving nerds as they are in the UK, so I'm not really sure how to explain the discrepancy. I should make it clear that I have zero desire to acquire illicit drugs, I just found the contrast amusing.

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On a completely different note, the complicated Australian bureaucracy thing I was dealing with last week led me to another bizarre realisation. I remember when I met lowercasename for the first time, he told me that his parents (who emigrated from Russia to Australia in the 1980s and spoke only Russian to each other, and him, at home) had left Russia before various technological things were invented, and as a result of being isolated from other Russian-speakers had no idea of the Russian names of such things. Therefore, his family basically invented their own Russian words for various pieces of software and commonplace computer hardware, and no other Russian speakers use the same terminology.

My situation is slightly different. I lived in Australia long enough that I had a tax file number, did paid work and filed tax returns, and had to contribute towards the rent and bills of a shared house — but I did all this at a time when everything was entirely analog, and on paper. My wages were paid directly into my bank account, but I never had internet banking, I filed my tax returns on paper and got my tax refunds as cheques which I had to deposit physically in the bank, and when I needed to transfer rent money to my housemate I withdrew cash from my bank account and filled in a paper deposit slip and deposited the money in person at a branch of her bank. I existed entirely on paper.

And of course, since I've lived and worked in the UK during the years when such things were increasingly done online, I know how to navigate all this stuff in a UK context, I know the UK terminology, and I am as close as it's possible to be to a 'digital native' ... in the UK, and its various pieces of bureaucracy. But in Australia, I have no idea! I don't even know the names for government web platforms, or technical terminology (someone over the phone was like 'you can pay it via BPay,' and I was like 'what's BPay?').

It's as if I'm a time-traveller from an age of paper. It's not an insurmountable problem (I can eventually figure out most of this stuff via context or Google), but it is an oddly disorienting feeling.

I've spent the morning watching the ABC's coverage of the Western Australian state election. (I'm not from WA, but my family are all either political journalists, political staffers, or just rabid Australian politics watchers, so obsessively watching Australian political coverage is kind of mandatory for me).

There are landslides ... and then there are landslides. (To decode this for non-Australians, the Liberal Party in Australia is the conservative right-wing party in Australia, the ALP is the Australian Labor Party, our centre-left party, and the NAT in the screenshot refers to the National Party, the conservative party that only stands in rural seats, and always contests elections as the junior partner in a coalition with the Liberals. So for the National Party to win more seats than the Liberals is basically unheard of.)

A few links that have caught my eye over the past few days:

Data visualisation of a survey done by Fansplaining about whether people in fandom prefer to read fic for fandoms with which they're familiar, or on the basis of tropes in fandoms that they haven't read/watched/etc. I found this really interesting, because it was basically a fifty-fifty split, with further data for each set of reading preferences. I fall solely in the 'only read fic for fandoms with which I am deeply familiar' (I don't even like reading fic for ongoing canons).

( Cut for discussion of the pandemic )

Like many Australians who grew up in Canberra, holidays 'down the South Coast' of New South Wales were a huge part of my childhood, and the old bridge in Batemans Bay was an icon of those landscapes. Now that old bridge is being replaced, and the operators (whose job is to lift the bridge two times a day to allow ferries to pass through) are out of a job (although my impression is that they were on the verge of retirement). This is a delightful interview with one of those operators about his experiences.

I'll return to people's suggested prompts in future Friday open threads, but for now I've got a prompt of my own. This one's pretty straightforward: what is something you've read recently online that made you think, that resonated with you, or that taught you something interesting.

A couple of requests: please, nothing to do with the ongoing US election shitshow (I've driven myself into a frenzy of sleepless panic worrying about the situation in specific states, and I really need to focus on something else), and if possible I would prefer whatever you share here to be written text rather than podcasts or videos. If you prefer to share videos/podcasts, that's fine, but be aware that it's extremely unlikely I'll watch/listen to them — I find them an extremely inefficient way to absorb information and if there's not a written transcript, I generally avoid them as a medium.

( My answer behind the cut )

I found it very persuasive.

I've found that these briefer posts with three links seem to work better than longer links roundups, so I think they're going to become a semi-permanent fixture here.

First up, a link to the online exhibition put together by my former PhD supervisor (and others), A History of Ireland in 10 Words. This exhibition is a synthesis of work that they did initially on the academic Dictionary of the Irish Language, that they then adapted for a nonspecialist audience into a book, A History of Ireland in 100 Words, and then adapted into the exhibition. Apparently there were beautiful banners up all over central Dublin as well. The exhibition was meant to be in a physical space ... and then lockdown happened.

I found this article in The Guardian, in which newspaper reviewers and critics revise their former reviews (of music, films, books, etc), to be really interesting and thoughtful. I cannot believe the music critic who originally hated Daft Punk's Discovery album, though!

Finally, enjoy this video of Australian magpies singing together.

This has been a weird week.

I discovered, after the fact, that Boris Johnson had come to my workplace (or at least one of the departments in the hospital site on which my library is located) for a campaign visit. The press weren't told, most people working in the hospital weren't told, and the people who were there as props to this particular campaign stunt were told they weren't allowed to talk to him. However, the amazing SJimons, a medical student at Cambridge, delivered a spectacular, spontaneous rant immediately afterwards, all the more impressive because she managed to say everything necessary with clarity, concision, and righteous anger. You can watch her here. I recognise her from around the library, but have never spoken to her beyond issuing or returning books — next time she's in I must applaud her!

I have to wonder why Johnson was in Cambridge at all. This constituency is a two-horse race between Labour and the Lib Dems, and has been since the late 1980s. Furthermore, it had pretty much the highest Remain vote in the entire country. Unless he was hoping to be booed out of the site by a chorus of angry patients, I'm not sure what he was trying to achieve.

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Yesterday Matthias and I braved the rain and went out to the cinema to watch Official Secrets, which made me a) furious all over again with Tony Blair, and b) have a panic attack in the cinema because one of the characters was threatened with deportation. #migrantlife, I suppose. The film featured just about every British actor ever, and was a competently told political/investigative journalism drama, and I'm glad I saw it, although I hadn't expected to be hyperventilating in a darkened cinema on a Saturday afternoon due to a panic attack!

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I've spent most of today doing calming things: yoga for an hour, gentle amounts of cleaning and decluttering (if anyone in the Cambridge area wants two used desk lamps, get in touch!), and reading Any Old Diamonds by KJ Charles (lovely and cheerful, although not my favourite of her books) while drinking tea. I've achieved some sort of equilibrium, I suppose.

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I know there are at least a couple of fellow Australian migrants subscribed to my Dreamwidth, so the following may be relevant to your interests: ABC iView is now available overseas, provided you download the appropriate app. More details here. I've always appreciated that the ABC removed the region lock on its news streaming channels during elections and similar big political events, but it's nice that we'll have access to this coverage all year round now. I can combine my stress about UK politics with more stress about Australian politics! It's worth noting that although the press release I've linked talks mostly about access to the news and current affairs content, it appears international viewers will have access to all ABC content on iView, including sport, comedy, drama, documentaries, children's programming, and other entertainment.

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I finalised my Yuletide signup yesterday; anyone who hasn't yet signed up has a few hours yet. Details can be found at the yuletide_admin comm.

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I've noticed a couple of new people subscribed to my journal recently — feel free to say hello in the comments if you want to introduce yourselves!

I came across this book meme a while ago, and had been waiting until I had a clear month or so to complete it. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, so feel free to steal it and do the meme yourself if you'd like.

Day one is a tough one: favourite book from childhood.

Now, depending on how old I was when you asked me this question, the answer would change quite a bit. I am a fairly loyal reader, and even in childhood I tended to have long stretches of time where a particular book was my favourite — and these can roughly be set out as follows:

( Books behind the cut )

As I said before, I can talk about favourite childhood books forever, and would love to hear about yours, or discuss any of my favourites, in the comments.

( The other days )

So. Lots of stuff to get through this week, as my corner of the internet has been particularly full of people doing wonderful, clever and awesome things.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz had a busy week. Here's Rochita on the uses of anger, her new short story, and being interviewed for Lightspeed magazine's author spotlight.

Catherine Lundoff has had so many submissions to her 'Older Women in SFF' recommendations post that she's had to split it into two. Part one, part two.

I really liked this review of Zen Cho's writing by Naomi Novik.

This review by Sarah Mesle of the most recent episode of Game of Thrones made a lot of points I've been struggling to articulate. Content note for discussion of violence, abuse and rape.

I really appreciated this thoughtful post by Tade Thompson on safety, community and dissent.

Natalie Luhrs makes some really important points here:

This is part of the ongoing conversation about the importance of different voices in our community. About making space for people who have been told–explicitly and implicitly–that what they have to say isn’t worthwhile and that they need to sit down and listen and that someday, maybe, they’ll be allowed to speak.

This list of Best Young Australian novelists looks great, and reflects the Australia that I grew up in. Congratulations to all the winners!

I have to admit that the #hometovote hashtag has been making me cry.

I wrote two longish posts this week. One is over at Wordpress: a review of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. The other is here at Dreamwidth/LJ, and is a primer to Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy.

My mother is a radio journalist. Her programme this week is on Eurovision, and you can listen to it here (not geoblocked). There are additional features . I am an unashamed Eurovision fan, and as you can see, it runs in the family.

Texts from Hieronymous Bosch made me laugh and laugh.

Happy Friday, everyone.